A Democratic Revolution - Owen Jones

The status quo might be treated as common sense now, but future generations will surely look back with a mixture of astonishment and contempt at how British society is currently organised: the richest 1,000 individuals worth £520 billion, while hundreds of thousands of people have to queue to eat in food banks; a thriving financial elite that helped plunge Britain into a vortex of economic collapse, which was rescued by over £1 trillion of public money but continues to operate much as before; a reigning dogma that treats the state as an obstacle to be eradicated and shunned, even as the state serves as the backbone for private interests; a corporate elite, dependent as it is on state largesse, that refuses to contribute money to the state,; a media that does not exist to inform, educate as well as challenge all those with power, but which serves as a platform for the ambitions, prejudices and naked self-interest of a small number of wealthy moguls. More startling to our descendents will be how this was passed off as normal, as entirely rational and defensible, and how institutions run by the elite attempted, with considerable success, to redirect people's anger to those at the very bottom of society.

This status quo - as irrational as it is unjust - is guaranteed by the Establishment. But there is nothing inevitable about the Establishment: it does not rule Britain because it epitomizes the most effective, efficient and rational way or organizing society. The Establishment represents the institutional and intellectual means by which a wealthy elite defends its interests in a democracy.